no more unlike the robber-nest destroyed in war by other robbers than the young Bonn student is unlike his rough-and-ready forefathers.

As we push our way down the Rhine we soon come to another such contrast, the little peaceful town of Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings and others of the Low Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign, Count Frederick III. He gave them each a plot of land, built their houses and exempted them from all dues and imposts, besides granting them full freedom of worship; but not for them alone was this boon, for as other wars made other exiles, so were all and every welcome to Neuwied, and the place even now contains Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and Quakers, all living in peace together. The United Brethren (or Moravians) founded a colony here in 1750. The honesty of these people is proverbial, their simplicity of life is patriarchal, and the artist at least will not object to their manners, for the sake of the pleasing costume of their women, whose white caps look akin to the peaceful, rural background of their life, red and blue bands on these caps respectively distinguishing the married from the unmarried women. The little brook that gives its name to the village runs softly into the Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid murmuring rushes, while beyond it the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to rise over the Rhine-banks, and the scenery after Andernach becomes again what we so admired at Bingen and Bornhofen.

ORTENSTEIN.

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting. However, of its relics we can only mention, en passant, the parish church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the council-house, significantly called the "Jews' bath," and the old sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine-boats with the millstones in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of the Brohl we meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley through which this stream winds come upon the retired little watering-place of Tönnistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its steel waters; and Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths, stretching for miles inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving us only at the entrance of the beech-woods that have grown up in these cauldron-like valleys and fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of legends and of fairies. One of these Schlegel has versified, the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Müller sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are lighted and ghostly revels held, the story of which so fascinates the fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel trick, and he plunges in to join the revellers and learn the truth. Local tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but scarcely-ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the founder: the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, is almost whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed German tale of Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son Siegfried assigned to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring grotto of Hochstein is shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to the Rocky Gate we pass through the singular little town of Niedermendig, an hour's distance from the lake—a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters, but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones. There is something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who have seen those dreary slate-villages—dark, damp, but naked, for moss and weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the decay of other stones—which dot the moorlands of Wales. The fences are slate; the gateposts are slate; the stiles are of slate; the very "sticks" up which the climbing roses are trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses, stables, are all of one dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike; hearth-stones and threshold-stones and grave-stones, all of the same material. It is curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine, however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia, where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and steam are always rising.

Sinzig, on the left bank of the last gorge of the Rhine, besides its legend of Constantine has a convent said to have been built by the empress Helena; and in this convent a mummied body of a long-dead monk, canonized by popular tradition, and remarkable for the journey to Paris which his body took and returned from unharmed in the days of Napoleon I. On the opposite shore, not much lower down, is another of the numberless pilgrimage-chapels with which the Rhine abounds, and the old city of Linz, with an authentic history dating from the ninth century, telling of an independence of any but nominal authority for some time, and at last of a transfer of the lordship of the old town from the Sayns to the archbishops of Cologne. This supremacy had to be kept up by the "strong hand," of which the ruined fortress is now the only reminder; but there is a more beautiful monument of old days and usages in the thirteenth-century church of St. Martin, not badly restored, where the stained-glass windows are genuinely mediæval, as well as the fresco on gold ground representing the "Seven Joys of Mary," painted in 1463. Just above Remagen lies the Victoria-berg, named after the crown-princess of Prussia, the princess-royal of England, and this is the evening resort of weary Remageners—a lovely public garden, with skilfully-managed vistas, and a "Victoria temple," placed so as to command the five prettiest views up and down the stream, as well as over the woodland behind the town. Let not the classic name of "temple" deceive us, however, for this is a genuine German arbor, picturesque and comfortable, with a conical roof of stately and rustic pillars, seats and balustrade rising from the steep bank on which the "lookout" is perched. The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches, rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is worthy of the New World. The dark rocks and narrow slits of valleys piled with snow and crusted with ice, the locked waterfalls and caves with portcullises of icicles let down across their mouths, make a pendant for the splendid and little-known scenery of American mountains in January. By one of the castles, a ruin belonging to the Steins of Nassau, poetically called Landskröne, or the "Land's Crown," from its beautiful situation on a basalt hill, is a perfectly-preserved chapel perched on the top of the rock, where, says the legend, the daughter of the besieged lord of the castle once took refuge during a local war. The